Raymond Brost (1896-1970) was a Tin Pan Alley composer whose many hits included ‘Has Anybody Seen My Girl’ and Shirley Temple’s ‘Animal Crackers in My Soup’.
Perhaps the highpoint of Brown’s career was the six years he spent from 1925 in partnership with Buddy G DeSylva and Lew Brown. Their Broadway show Good News (1927) was filmed twice by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The pictures retained some, though not all, of the original show’s numbers, including ‘The Varsity Drag’.
Louis Brownstein (1893-1958) became a Tin Pan Alley songwriter in 1912, but his career reached a new level when he partnered with Buddy G DeSylva and Ray Henderson in 1925. They wrote many standards, including ‘Sonny Boy’ (for Al Jolson) and ‘Sunny Side Up’, as well as the Broadway hit Good News (1927).
Several of the original numbers from Good News were retained in Metro’s two film versions, including ‘The Best Things in Life are Free’.
George Gard DeSylva (1895-1950) had two distinct careers, which overlapped. He was originally a Tinpan Alley songwriter, teaming up in 1925 with Lew Brown and Ray Henderson to become one of the most successful songwriting partnerships of the time. They wrote many hit songs, including the standards ‘April Showers’, ‘Button Up Your Overcoat’ and ‘Look for the Silver Lining’. They also scored a major success with the musical Good News (1927) and other Broadway shows.
At the same time, DeSylva was a Hollywood producer, initially with Fox and later, and most significantly, at Paramount, where he oversaw, amongst others, some of Preston Sturges’s best films.
When MGM made its two versions of Good News, they retained some, but by no means all, of the songs from the original show.
Edgar J MacGregor (1878-1957) was an actor who became a highly-successful theatre director, usually on Broadway, from 1910 through to the late 1940s. His successes included Good News (1927), Funny Face (1927), DuBarry Was a Lady (1939), Panama Hattie (1939) and several editions of Earl Carroll’s Vanities.
MacGregor’s screen career was less auspicious. He travelled to Hollywood in 1930 to work on the screen version of Good News, co-directing with Nick Grinde. He never directed another film.
Harry A Grinde (1893-1979) was a vaudeville performer who found work as a director at MGM in the late twenties. From then until 1945 he directed around sixty generally low budget features for a variety of studios.
Early on, Metro occasionally used Grinde to work in partnership with tyro directors who had joined the studio directly from theatre work. For example, he co-directed The Bishop Murder Case (1930) with Broadway director David Burton.
Another such was Good News, which Grinde co-directed with Edgar J MacGregor, director of the original broadway production.
Grinde did not direct any additional musicals at Metro, being far more at home with westerns and thrillers, though he did, out of left field, write the screenplay for Babes in Toyland.
The Crew
| Nick Grinde | Director |
| Edgar J MacGregor | Director (as Stage Director) |
| Frances Marion | Scenario |
| Joseph Farnham | Dialogue |
| Buddy G DeSylva | Lyricist |
| Ray Henderson | Composer |
| Lew Brown | Lyricist |
| Nacio Herb Brown | Songwriter |
| Arthur Freed | Songwriter |
| J Russel Robinson | Songwriter |
| George Waggner | Songwriter |
| Larry Shay | Songwriter |
| George Ward | Songwriter |
| Reggie Montgomery | Songwriter |
| Percy Hilburn | Cinematographer |
| William LeVanway | Editor |
| Cedric Gibbons | Art Director |
| Douglas Shearer | Sound Recording Director |
| Russell Franks | Sound Recording Engineer (uncredited) |
| David Cox | Costume Design |
| Sammy Lee | Choreography |
Abraham Simon (1897-1957) was a drummer who ended up leading his own orchestra. One of his regular singers in the 1920s was Charles Kaley, who starred in Lord Byron of Broadway.
Lyman was also a songwriter, his biggest hit being the standard ‘I Cried for You’, co-written with Gus Arnheim and with lyrics by Arthur Freed. It was sung by Judy Garland in Babes in Arms.
Abe Lyman and his Orchestra made their screen debut in Syncopated Symphony (1928), a Vitaphone short. Out of a dozen or so subsequent film appearances, two were in Good News and Madam Satan.
Lyman gave up music in the late forties to become a restaurateur.
Lewis Keester Sweeney (1910-96) is not credited on this website against any of the musicals listed, but mention of him is essential.
Sweeney was an art student sent from UCLA in 1936 to help MGM with makeup for The Good Earth (1937). He stayed at the studio for over a quarter of a century.
His internet presence is peculiar. It acknowledges him as an important makeup artist who worked with the great MGM stars of the classic period, but both IMDb and the AFI only show a few credits from 1956 onwards, largely television assignments. There is no indication of which films he worked on through the bulk of his career.
Sweeney knew nothing about makeup when called to MGM and had to learn on the job. In an interview, he said the first star he worked with was Jeanette MacDonald, who helped him out and became a friend.
The obituary for Keester Sweeney in the Los Angeles Times described him as the “MGM makeup artist who prepared such stars as Jeanette MacDonald, Judy Garland, Greta Garbo and Fred Astaire for the cameras”. The unavailability of details about this apparently eminent career is mystifying.
George Westmore (1879-1931) was the founder of what is unquestionably Hollywood’s greatest dynasty. Five generations of Westmores, including six of George’s sons, worked as makeup artists for over a hundred years.
George Westmore was a hairdresser with a distinguished clientele before emigrating from the UK to Canada and then to the United States, where he worked in beauty parlours. In 1917 he established Hollywood’s first makeup department, for the Selig company, and can be credited with creating the profession of film makeup artist. In the 1920s, Westmore worked on some of the most notable pictures starring Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks, including The Sheik (1921) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924).
Shortly before taking his own life in a particularly unpleasant fashion (mercury poisoning), Westmore worked on three musicals at MGM: The Rogue Song, Call of the Flesh and New Moon.
